The geographic separation between populations explains a significant proportion of the human genetic variation. Patterns of genetic variation can be exploited to provide insights about past population histories, illuminating events such as migrations and admixture. Additionally, the spatial structure within genetic datasets can be used to geographically assign individuals based on their genetic profiles, with wide ranging applications from genetic management to forensics. Here, we devised a scoring system measuring the genetic affinity of individuals to different geographical locations and model the score in a kriging framework. This allows us to interpolate the score across the geographical range and find the spatial position which maximizes the genetic affinity. This approach is implemented in a new tool, planarPart, and appears to outperform current alternatives in terms of accuracy and computational performance both at local and global scales. It can efficiently position individual without restricting assumptions about the shape of the allele frequency surface.

Our approach is therefore tailored to large-scale datasets such as those now generated by high-throughput sequencing platforms. Our scoring scheme is applicable on the haplotypes, allowing for estimating the spatial origin of the haplotypes present in the admixed populations, efficiently tapping into the information about our spatial ancestry and history encapsulated in the nuclear genome. In particular, we have explored the genetic legacy of the slave trade by tracing the geographical origins of the people captured during the trans-Atlantic slave trade (TAST) and by exploring the mosaic ancestry of populations affected by the TAST.

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EUROTAST was a Marie Curie Actions Initial Training Network (ITN), funded by the European Union under the Seventh Framework Programme, and coordinated by the University of Copenhagen. For more information CONTACT US.

Image acknowledgements

Unless otherwise stated, the historical images used on this website are taken, with kind permission, from The Atlantic Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Americas: A Visual Record by Jerome S. Handler and Michael L. Tuite Jr. The database is under copyright: 2013, Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and University of Virginia. Permission for reuse of these image must be sought directly from the authors above.
All EUROTAST photographs are copyright protected exclusive to EUROTAST Initial Training Network.